Barry Heneghan
The measure only exists where this member actually spoke in the debate their vote belongs to, and where that vote can be tied to a specific question. Both cuts are steep.
| Votes cast | 350 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 4 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 4 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 0 |
The third row is the sharpest cut. A committee-stage sitting can hold fifteen divisions while its speeches discuss forty-two numbered amendments, and the record does not say which amendment each division was. Those votes are counted here and deliberately left unscored rather than guessed.
The same scorable votes, split by whether the member went with their party. The top-right cell is the one worth reading: a stated position reversed while following the party line.
| Voted with own party | Voted against own party | |
|---|---|---|
| Matched their words | 0 | 1 |
| Contradicted their words | 2 | 0 |
Not scored: 2 where the vote could not be tied to a question, 1 where no clear position was stated in the debate.
Valence runs −1 (negative) to +1 (positive). This is a separate measure from alignment above and says nothing about how anyone voted — "the Minister has been asleep at the wheel" is strongly negative and carries no position on the question.
| Model | Speeches scored | Mean valence | Corpus mean |
|---|---|---|---|
| vader | 339 | +0.544 | +0.423 |
Mean tone by topic, most negative first. Topics come from an LDA model fitted over debate contributions; the terms are the model's, the labels are hand-assigned.
| Topic | Speeches | Mean valence |
|---|---|---|
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 7 | +0.700 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 9 | +0.754 |
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 16 | +0.776 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 7 | +0.824 |
Contributions whose tone sits more than two standard deviations from this member's own average. Baselines are per member on purpose — an absolute threshold would just rank people by temperament.
Gabhaim buíochas as sin. Is infheistíocht an-mhór é €4 milliún. Táim fíorbhuíoch as sin. Tá an tAire ag cur go leor airgid i mBaile Átha Cliath thuaidh so tá sé iontach é sin a fheiscint. Is iarmhac léinn mé de chuid Ollscoil Chathair Bhaile Átha Cliath. Bhí m…
First, I thank the hardworking women and men of Beaumont Hospital. When I was in fifth year, I was extremely unwell and they looked after me and cared for me. When my mother suffered a polytrauma, they looked after me. However, thousands of constituents are co…
Any upcoming legislation on clerical institutional abuse must have a cross-Border dimension. Catholic dioceses like Clogher span the Border and so do their school networks. We have evidence of clergy being moved between jurisdictions because of abuse concerns.…
I welcome the fact there is movement on this, but at the heart of the issue is a simple question of fairness. Workers who come to Ireland on employment permits are legally present in the country, paying taxes and contributing to our essential sectors, such as …
Ní raibh mé ag an gcruinniú sin; bhí mé ag cruinniú eile. Táim fíorbhuíoch as an €2 milliún sin d’Fhoras na Gaeilge. Bhí mé ag caint le hionadaithe aréir nuair a chuir an tAire an fógra amach. Gabhaim buíochas leis as sin. Agus muid ag caint mar gheall ar an n…
I too join in the condolences on the attack that happened on the Jewish community in Australia. I also support the plea for funding for The Complex. Regarding the Cabinet committee on housing, across the country AHBs have signed turnkey deals that then collaps…
An bhliain seo chaite, labhair mé leis an Taoiseach faoi shaol na hoíche i mBaile Átha Cliath thuaidh, agus i mBaile Átha Cliath go ginearálta. I asked the Taoiseach about saol na hoíche, the night-time economy in Dublin agus dúirt sé go raibh mé lán le fuinne…
Toisc gurb é an chéad uair dom a bheith ag caint sa Teach seo i mbliana, ba mhaith liom athbhliain faoi mhaise a ghabháil le gach duine. I am seeking a clear update on the progression of the occupied territories Bill. The programme for Government I signed up f…
Táim fíorbhuíoch as sin. Tá na daoine atá ag obair le Gaeilge 365 ag déanamh obair na gcapall. Maidir leis an rud faoina raibh mé ag caint leis an Aire níos luaithe, níl sé greanta i gcloch. Tá a fhios agam nach bhfuil an tAire sa Roinn oideachais ach tá go le…
Tuigim é sin. Tá brón orm ach tá go leor eolais ag an Aire faoin ábhar seo. Tá fearg orm faoi. Táim 27 mbliana d'aois. Tá glúin nua ag teacht anuas agus iad ag foghlaim an rud céanna a d'fhoghlaim mé féin. Ní bheadh Gaeilge agam gan mo dheirfiúr. Nílim ag cur …
Ba mhaith liom labhairt faoi rud éigin atá i mbéal an phobail agus is é sin go raibh go leor daoine ó Éirinn ar an turas ar an flotilla go dtí Gaza, where the Israeli Government illegally captured us all in international waters, completely broke international …
Deputy O' Flynn said there are no Government TDs here. Have you not been calling me a Government TD for the last three months? It is ridiculous. I do not have sympathy-----…
Alignment by the party a member sat for on the day, with 95% Wilson intervals. This is the test the measure could have failed.
| Party | Aligned | 95% CI | n |
|---|---|---|---|
| PBP | 82.5% | 68–91% | 40 |
| LAB | 78.2% | 69–85% | 101 |
| IND | 76.5% | 72–81% | 327 |
| SF | 75.8% | 69–81% | 198 |
| SD | 71.4% | 58–82% | 49 |
| FG | 69.1% | 62–76% | 162 |
| FF | 67.9% | 60–75% | 165 |
| GP | 56.8% | 41–71% | 37 |
Members of government parties align their stated position with their vote 9.4 points less often than Independents — bootstrap 95% CI [+2.7, +16.0], which excludes zero. Opposition parties sit 9.5 points above government too, CI [+3.1, +15.9]. Independents and opposition members are indistinguishable from each other (−0.0 points, CI [−6.3, +6.2]). So the gap does not come from having no party; it comes from being in government, which is what a whip effect should look like. Read this as the measure behaving sensibly, not as a finding about any individual.
Two automated methods were built and both failed. What survives is the rule-based layer, which is why the coverage above is narrow.
| Method | Accuracy | 95% CI | n |
|---|---|---|---|
| nli-vs-mover-anchor:deberta | 35.9% | 29–42% | 234 |
| nli-vs-mover-anchor:distilroberta | 11.5% | 8–16% | 234 |
Zero-shot entailment was asked to judge contributions whose true position is known — the member moved the amendment, so the answer is support by construction — and got it right 11.5% of the time, returning "unclear" or "oppose" for nearly everything. A classifier trained on the rule-labelled cases over the corpus embeddings reached 71.1% against a 65.3% majority-class baseline: better than chance, not better enough. Both are excluded from every figure on this page. Only the rule-based cascade, which is exact where it fires and silent where it does not, is used.
Position is read from the member's own contributions in the debate section the division belongs to, by a three-step cascade: an explicit move of the question ("I move amendment No. 5", true by construction); declarative stance phrases ordered so negations are tested first, because "I cannot support" and "I do not oppose" both defeat a naive keyword match; and, where neither fires, a zero-shot entailment model judging the contribution against the question put. Tone uses a separate model and is reported separately. Agreement against hand-labelled cases, with bootstrap intervals, is on the evidence page; no score here should be read without it.